True Lives

Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?”

Heti, impatient with fiction, makes use of real e-mails and recordings of actual conversations.

Photograph by Ethan Levitas

Proust said that all of Dostoyevsky’s novels could be called “Crime and Punishment.” The Tolstoyan title of Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?” (Henry Holt) would surely serve for uncountably many works of fiction. But Heti’s first stab at an answer, which appears on the second page, is disconcerting:

How should a person be? I sometimes wonder about it, and I can’t help answering like this: a celebrity. But for all that I love celebrities, I would never move somewhere that celebrities actually exist. My hope is to live a simple life, in a simple place, where there’s only one example of everything.

Heti goes on to say that by a “simple life” she means “a life of undying fame that I don’t have to participate in. I don’t want anything to change, except to be as famous as one can be, but without that changing anything. . . . It is the quality of fame one is after here, without any of its qualities.” The reader might reasonably fear that any book whose answer to its own religiously important question is so shallowly secular should not be asking it in the first place. But there is a deliberate flippancy here, and it becomes clear enough that Heti is aiming at a calculated desacralization. On the one hand, there is the timeless seriousness of the question, and on the other hand there is the hapless, incoherent present-day chaos of the reply, which takes a whole messy book to fail to answer. The inadequacy of the response is a kind of contemporary confession, just as Heti intends her book to be a larger portrait of a generation that knows the right questions but struggles to find the right answers.

That generation is personified in this book by a group of Canadian friends, apparently in their late twenties or early thirties, who live and work—or fail to work—in Toronto. They are writers, artists, intellectuals, talkers, and they sit around discussing how best to be. This sounds hideously narcissistic. It is. Who cares about a bunch of more or less privileged North American artists, at leisure to examine their creative ambitions and anxieties? But it is an old and allowable indulgence (at least in France: “Lost Illusions,” “Sentimental Education,” “The Counterfeiters,” “Nausea”), and the hope of such projects is that what they lose in grandeur and stateliness they will gain in immediacy and honesty; that their local littlenesses can radiate generally, if not universally.

Sheila Heti is a thirty-five-year-old Canadian writer, who lives in Toronto. She has an appealing restlessness, a curiosity about new forms, and an attractive freedom from pretentiousness or cant (a freedom not always typical of original or avant-garde writers, for whom a Tom McCarthy-like self-solemnity is more the norm). Her first book, “The Middle Stories,” published when she was twenty-four, was a collection of brief postmodern fables, glittering if slight narratives that often proceed as if they were rewriting canonical fairy tales (a plumber and a princess, a girl who keeps a mermaid in a jar, a woman who lives in a shoe, and so on). Her first novel, “Ticknor” (2005), was not an obvious successor. Where “The Middle Stories” are spiky and fantastical, “Ticknor” is velvety and diplomatic. It is a gently compassionate portrait, a dramatic monologue, delivered by a man who considers himself a failure, about his unequal relations (imagined or true), with an old friend, who is now a famous man of letters. Based loosely on the friendship of the nineteenth-century American historian William H. Prescott and his more obscure biographer, George Ticknor, Heti’s account is a historical novel, but it is held together not by its historical accuracy but by its smoothly involving prose and by the melancholy intensity of its narrator. That it is the work of a postmodernist rather than a conventional realist can be felt in its compact and bold autonomy. It creates a singular world of prose, a discrete unfurling address, not unlike, say, the fictions of Steven Millhauser.

Heti’s new book is different again, and takes a new set of risks. It is subtitled “A Novel from Life.” Most novels, of course, are “from life” (Tolstoy often borrowed verbatim from his own experience), but “How Should a Person Be?” takes its place in a contemporary literary movement that is impatient with conventional fiction-making. “Increasingly, I’m less interested in writing about fictional people,” Heti said in an interview with the art critic Dave Hickey, “because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just—I can’t do it.” Her new book has a blurb from David Shields (who has written an anti-fictional manifesto, “Reality Hunger”), and the publisher says that it uses “transcribed conversations, real emails, plus heavy doses of fiction,” and is “part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part bawdy confessional.”

Sure enough, Heti’s book has a pleasingly (sometimes irritatingly) free, formless, and autobiographical atmosphere. Chunks of the novel are written in the style of a play; she includes e-mails, authorial thoughts, and essay-ettes, and there is a general absence of plot. The prose is what one might charitably call basic: simple, direct, sometimes ungainly. The conversation wanders rather than walks. Instead of “scenes” there are brief chapters, some with coolly quizzical titles: “What Is Empathy?” “What Is Freedom?” The characters appear not to be invented but to be drawn from Heti’s own circle of friends in Toronto: they are a writer named Sheila (the Heti figure); an artist named Margaux (based on the Canadian artist Margaux Williamson, who has collaborated with Heti); Misha (based on the writer Misha Glouberman, who has also worked with Heti); and Sholem (based on Sholem Krishtalka, who appeared in a film made by Margaux Williamson).

“Reality hunger” is an unwittingly apt phrase, because among the difficulties of this kind of storytelling is that one can never get enough reality into it. Realism is perpetually hungry, and keeps on trying new ways—every fifty years or so—to break into the larder. The writer who is seeking “life,” who is trying to write “from life,” is always unappeased, because no bound manuscript can ever be “real” enough. And this hunger is shared by most writers, not just by those who are hostile to conventional fictionality. Heti may include real e-mails and recordings of actual conversations, but, of course, her book is shaped and plotted (however lightly), and uses fiction as well as autobiography. Since most readers do not know who Heti’s friends are or how Heti herself lives, the characters will effectively appear invented—as Heti doubtless understands. Her book could always be more real; it could always be more directly “from life.”

Would this be to its aesthetic benefit? On the evidence presented, I doubt it. When Heti complains that she is tired of creating fictional characters, note first the puritanism of the response, whereby inventions are not merely invented but are somehow “fake”—false, lying, artificial. (This moralism is inseparable from the history of the novel and its detractors.) And note, too, that Heti unconsciously concedes something about the difficulty of putting invented characters under moral and formal pressure: she is tired, she says, of sending characters “through the paces of a fake story.” But the intermittent slackness of her own book betrays the disadvantages of not doing so.

“How Should a Person Be?” offers a vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist, Western city. Sheila and Margaux, though temperamentally different, share a recognizable set of aims and anxieties. Sheila is full of arrogance and insecurity, and a sense of weary belatedness: “I look at all the people who are alive today and think, These are my contemporaries. These are my fucking contemporaries! We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists. Every era has its art-form. The nineteenth century, I know, was tops for the novel.” Like Margaux, she is desperately committed to her craft (she is trying to write “a play that is going to save the world”) but is skeptical about her right to be an artist, and wary of making big claims for the value or beauty of her work. She spends the entire novel failing to write a play; like psychoanalysis, this unwritten play accompanies her ordinary existence, and has become coterminous with it. Margaux sometimes wishes she had gone into politics; her first thought on waking is “shame about all the things wrong in the world that she wasn’t trying to fix.”

Accordingly, she hopes that her art can be meaningful but “had her doubts, so worked doubly hard to make her choice of being a painter as meaningful as it could be.” There are problems so vast, Sheila thinks, that “a young woman sitting alone in her room should slit her throat and die sooner than bother about the state of her soul, when so many great artists before her spent decades recalibrating a single blank canvas in their studio, fifteen, sixteen hours a day, as their marriages crumbled into the soil.”

I’m not sure that this is a very coherent thought, but hasn’t every young contemporary artist shuddered a version of it? How talented am I? Do my gifts merit the luxury of dedicated labor? How on earth did the great artists get so much done? Why were they so bloody good? (Ian Dury’s song “There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards” perfectly captures the tone of resentful respect.) And for Sheila and Margaux there is the freedom and burden of gender, of justifying a female version of genius, a female version of entitlement: “I see that I’ve done as little as anyone else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I.” Both Sheila and Margaux have a surfeit of empathy, and Sheila wonders whether you have to stifle that will to empathize in order to “act freely, to know your own desires.” For her, the question becomes acute not with regard to her writing (though it is always present here as a literary question) but with regard to a sexually intense relationship she has with a man named Israel, who is erotically dominating and demanding. Sheila is initially excited by Israel’s needs, but she feels increasingly confused about the freedom of her agency: “Did I want to write this letter to Israel because I wanted to?”There’s that ungainly prose again. It’s a shame that Heti’s writing, normally pellucid, is so loose here. Of course, this is related to the raw, almost Warholian feel of the book. The novel begins and ends with a game the friends have initiated, a competition to produce the ugliest painting. In similar spirit, this is supposed to be a kind of “ugly novel,” written in rapid prose, unafraid to reveal its narrator, caught in the midst of her half-thoughts, her vulgar weaknesses (her obsession with fame and celebrity, for example), and her poorly concealed vulnerabilities. And the book’s rapid, pop-up format offers all manner of quick pleasures. It enables Heti to use the novel as a kind of collection box, for gathering the stray donations and aperçus and complaints of her generation. There are plenty of good jokes, and at its best “How Should a Person Be?” has the feel of one of Kenneth Koch’s poems:

The other night out at the bars, I learned that Nietzsche wrote on a typewriter. It is unbelievable to me, and I no longer feel that his philosophy has the same validity or aura of truth that it formerly did.

Still, Heti is at times more enamored of the sparkle of her friends than seems warranted. A fair amount of the conversation has that sloppy, pert formlessness characteristic of university days, so that one occasionally has to remind oneself that the book’s author is thirty-five and not twenty. We get passages that begin with someone saying something like “You know, sometimes I get really excited thinking about autism”; Margaux can be found intoning: “You know, all week I was sitting at my computer, thinking, Am I retarded? Am I retarded? Am I retarded?” If I wanted to hear that, I could settle in at a Starbucks and wait for the schoolkids to get out at three o’clock. At one point, Margaux says that “everybody we hang out with is pretty competent at vaguely intelligent party talk,” which might be a fair summary of the book’s presiding atmosphere.

There is, too, a troubling knowingness, an uneasiness about how seriously the novel should press down on its seriously interrogative title. This sometimes presents itself, interestingly, as a failure of realism. At one moment, for instance, Sheila finds herself reading a book called “Important Artists.” She reads the biographies, takes notes, and lists the cities with the highest number of resident Important Artists. New York comes first, with thirty. Sheila decides to go to New York. It is the only obvious way to be Important: “Now that I had no hope of finding my soul by staying where I was, I wanted to take a different route to the one thing that would justify the ugliness in me: I would become Important.” So off she goes to New York, where she spends a few days not writing her play. The scene is amusing enough, but it isn’t real. I mean that it doesn’t ring true, and veers into broad burlesque. Even if it actually happened, at some distant point in Heti’s young life, the motivation as presented seems insultingly shallow and sketchy (that capitalized “Important”), and you get the feeling that the author is making fun of her narrator, or even making fun of her own desire to be an artist, and finds something embarrassing about the earnest and serious questions. After all, if you title a chapter that is only a few pages long “What Is Empathy?” you cannot seriously want to hear the reply.

Heti seems to mistrust her own mockery, too, and this produces only more earnestness, more self-questioning—but now of a disgusted, self-hating nature. This talented writer may well have identified a central dialectic of twenty-first-century postmodern being. Yet it’s hard to say whether she is the analyst of this evasiveness or its victim. Every so often, this book approaches a solitary, troubled, deep, entirely personal intensity that flickers into acuteness. (“I see that I’ve done as little as anyone else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I.”) But Heti never pursues that solitary note with the rigor that it deserves. It is easier, more charming, more hospitable, more successfully evasive, to bring in the gang of friends and get a “vaguely intelligent” conversation going. ♦

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007.